With the dramatic expansion of the Internet and development of numerous online commercial applications, promotion codes are often used by various providers of services and goods not only in an attempt to attract more customers but also just to keep the ones they have already dealt with previously. Promotion codes are thus intended to redeem discounts, special offers and rewards to online customers who are expected to enter a promotion code before completing the purchase of a good or booking of a service. This is commonly achieved by having the customer connecting to a server of the provider of services or goods on the Internet through the most spread Internet application, i.e., the world-wide-web or Web, from a personal computer or any other communications device running a standard Web browser or navigator. Then, the online customer can complete any sort of commercial transaction while interactive Web pages are exchanged between customer browser and server running the specific software application of the provider of goods or services. For example, travelers can book trips and travel products online from a travel service provider, e.g., an airline company or an online travel agency (OLTA). By entering a promotion code received through any traditional channel (newspaper, postal mailing), and more often nowadays through electronic mail services (E-mails) and wireless phone and message data services like SMS (short message service of the cellular phone systems) the customer can thus take advantage of a discount on current trip or trips concerned by the promotion.
Promotion codes are basically of two different types: personal or shared. Shared promotion code means that the same code can be used by all interested customers whereas a personal promotion code is unique to each customer. In the travel industry shared promotion codes have been often preferred to promote travel package because of their simplicity of use. In this case a single promotion code needs to be distributed to the customers. This makes the validation of the promotion code straightforward since anyone claiming the benefit of the promotion can get it as long as he/she is able to enter the single promotion code that has been distributed.
Providers of goods and services offering promotions are suffering a lack of revenue when selling the promoted items. Hence, they may not just be interested to sell more items to anybody. Most often, they would like also to control the distribution of the promotions so that they are primarily oriented towards specific groups of customers, e.g., to attract only new customers or to award loyal ones. Control of the distribution and use of shared promotion codes by the issuer are difficult, if not impossible, since they can be used by anyone who becomes aware of them. This problem can only be partially overcome by limiting the overall number of times a shared promotion code can be used (so as to bound the loss of revenue) but there is no way of ensuring that only targeted customers will benefit of it. Thus, if shared promotion codes work well in order to encourage any customers to buy certain kinds of products or services they are not adapted to be used, e.g., as rewards or incentives as part of a loyalty program that would be destined to certain groups of customers.
With personal promotion codes promotion issuers manage to distribute a unique code to each targeted customer through any appropriate distribution channel where targeted customers can be identified, e.g., postal or electronic address of registered customers. Personal promotion codes give a much better control of the diffusion and use of the promotion codes since each identified customer receives a unique promotion code which can only be used once. However, using personal promotion codes does not go without posing some problems too.
First, a large or very large number of codes, ranging from thousands to tens of thousands of codes, must be generated. The generated promotion codes must not only be unique, they must also appear to be random and unintelligible to the customers. Anyone that would manage to get two or more promotion codes must not be able to find easily a way of guessing what would be other valid codes for the promotion. This must be combined however with the fact that code must not be too long or to difficult to enter by the customer who has received it. Especially, code to enter must only be comprised of alphanumeric characters easy to read and type on a keyboard. Hence, the known cryptographic methods which permit to generate, e.g., one-way hash functions like MD5 (message digest function 5) are not convenient because they need to work on data blocks and key size too large for generating short promotion codes and are not restricted to alphanumeric characters.
Then, all generated promotion codes must be stored in a database in order to allow code validation each time a customer claims the benefit of a promotion. Storing a large or very large number of promotion codes in the database takes a lot of memory resources. Moreover, costly database calls, including queries of alphanumeric fields, have to be made to validate that promotion code actually exists in the database. This must be done in spite of the fact that, most often, only a small percentage of all the valid promotion codes is actually used. Hence, most of the promotion codes are worthlessly stored while always penalizing the successful searches in database.
It is therefore a broad object of the invention to overcome the difficulties, here above discussed, of issuing and storing a large number of personal promotion codes in a database in order to validate the promotion codes submitted by customers.
It is a specific object of the invention to minimize the resources needed to handle promotion codes in the database by not requiring having to store in it the complete list of generated promotion codes but only those that have been actually used by customers.
It is also an object of the invention to allow validating promotion codes without requiring numerous costly database calls.
It is a further object of the invention to allow that used promotion codes be stored as integers to avoid querying alphanumeric fields.
Further objects, features and advantages of the present invention will become apparent to the ones skilled in the art upon examination of the following description in reference to the accompanying drawings. It is intended that any additional advantages be incorporated herein.